A site where a man with far too much interest in beer gets to write about it.

Thursday, 9 July 2015

The hops in Shepherd Neame beers

Last week despite my preference for spending Thursday nights hitting people I found myself in a pub in Kent playing bat and trap, a game popular with the locals.Shepherd Neame brewery were having a do and people from various companies they work with were invited.

Having recently learnt that there's talk of Sheps avoiding the problem of light strike by using reduced hop extracts, or even no hops at all I took the opportunity to talk to members of the brewing staff about exactly what hops they do use, and how much.

Being a traditional Kentish brewery (or is it brewery of Kent?) they do of course use a lot of hops. The core beer range is all hops from Kent (Target, Admiral, First Gold and Goldings were mentioned), and with their craftier beers they've branched out to use foreign hops such as Centennial and Saaz too. As to how much hops they use, the beer I was on, Master Brew (3.7% ABV) has around 35 bitterness units, the sort of hopping rate that would put it in the realms of craft beer if only it tasted of grapefruit. Perhaps they would get more cred if they called it a Session IPA rather than a Kentish ale.

I didn't ask about high gravity brewing, I'll see what I can glean next time I meet one of their brewers. Traditional breweries have been getting several different beers from the same mash for a long time though.

I've never been a fan of Spitfire but the Master Brew was good at this event. Whether the two beers are related I couldn't say.

I’m not sure about high-gravity brewing, but they seem to ferment their beers right out to dryness, so that there are very little residual malt sugars remaining in the finished beer. The result is a thin-bodied, un-balanced beer, with a harsh bitterness and a strange metallic taste.

What's your take on the light strike thing? (I didn't follow the quote on Yvan's blog about Sheps' yeast being particularly good at preventing it (?).) I argued about lightstrike at some length with that whippersnapper Dredge four years ago. Ironically, the blighter got into my head & I've been avoiding clear bottles ever since.

Light strike definitely exists, and even I notice it sometimes, particularly the burnt rubber taste I associate with green bottles of cheap French lager. The way some of my fellow beer geeks go on about it though does make me suspect that either they're a lot more sensitive to it than me or they're over egging the pudding.

As to the sulphur eating yeast preventing light strike I really don't know. Interesting story but I've never heard anything like it before.

I can actually sort of live with lightstrike. It doesn't make for awesome beer... but after you've opened the bottle and had a few sips it tends to be over. Or just stick a slice of lime in it as the old Corona tale goes. (No idea if there is any truth in that one mind you.)

Whole original point of my post was that a bottle of beer in clear glass being placed in a UK "top 10" by someone holding the UK's supposed highest beer qualification makes a joke of the whole thing.

It is, of course, asking for trouble - but I've popped a bunch of these sorts of beers onto a sunny windowsill for an hour, then chilled, then opened... good way to get a nice blast of that weird aroma and it does seem to last longer down the glass that way.

Almost all seem to exhibit the same property when fresh off the supermarket shelf - just much more lightly so. (Not that I've done an exhaustive test of this... the fact that a brewery sees it fit to put a beer in clear glass says enough about their respect for the product to me and I'm not that much of a masochist.)

The chemical behind light strike (MBT) is very volatile so is most noticable when a bottle is first opened. I've also done the deliberate light strike bottles thing and when you've really cranked it up it there's no getting away from it.